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The largest ice island in almost 50 years poses no immediate threat as it will take up to two years to drift through the Arctic Ocean, the Canadian who discovered it told AFP.Trudy Wohlleben, a forecaster from the Canadian Ice Service, spotted the massive slab of ice that broke off a glacier in Greenland last week as she analyzed raw data from a NASA satellite.At about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) long and 10 kilometers wide, the ice island is about four times the size of Manhattan and experts say the last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk was in 1962.

The largest ice island in almost 50 years poses no immediate threat as it will take up to two years to drift through the Arctic Ocean, the Canadian who discovered it told AFP on Wednesday.Trudy Wohlleben, a forecaster from the Canadian Ice Service, spotted the massive slab of ice that broke off a glacier in Greenland last week as she analyzed raw data from a NASA satellite.At about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) long and 10 kilometers wide, the ice island is about four times the size of Manhattan and experts say the last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk was in 1962.

It's hard to truly appreciate the effects of climate change. We hear of a two degree jump over the course of decades, of dwindling animal populations, and of sea levels rising inches. These effects don't sound all that stunning. But when we see something like an island-sized chunk of ice fall into the ocean, that's when we really start to understand the drastic impacts that climate change is happening — already. Even now. Even back in 2008.

Environmental watchdog Greenpeace said Thursday it was expecting the disintegration of the Petermann glacier in north-western Greenland, from which a massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan broke off earlier this month."We had been expecting since last year that unavoidable break of the edge of the glacier, which we studied closely with an international team of researchers during an expedition in July and August 2009," Mads Flarup Christensen, who heads Greenpeace in the Nordic countries, told AFP.

A massive ice island four times the size of Manhattan has broken off an iceberg in north-western Greenland, a researcher at a US university said.Andreas Muenchow at the University of Delaware said in a statement Friday that the last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.Muenchow's research focuses on the Nares Strait, a region between far north-eastern Canada and northwestern Greenland, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) south of the North Pole.

A scientific controversy erupted this week over claims that methane trapped beneath the Arctic Ocean could suddenly escape, releasing huge quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas, in coming decades, with a huge cost to the global economy.

In mid-July this year, a roar echoed around one of the most remote inlets of northern Greenland -- and an island was born. No ordinary island, but a huge chunk of ice, roughly twice the size of Manhattan, that had broken from the Petermann Glacier.